David Thorpe

Eleven Days David Thorpe

A fire rages through a sleepy West London square, engulfing a small convent hidden away among the residential houses. When DI Jack Carrigan and DS Geneva Miller arrive at the scene they discover 11 bodies, yet there were only supposed to be 10 nuns in residence. It's 11 days before Christmas, and despite their superiors wanting the case solved before the holidays, Carrigan and Miller start to suspect that the nuns were not who they were made out to be.

Why did they make no move to escape the fire? Who is the 11th victim, whose body was found separate to the others? And where is the convent's priest, the one man who can answer their questions? Fighting both internal politics and the church hierarchy, Carrigan and Miller unravel the threads of a case that reaches back to the early 1970s, and the upsurge of radical Liberation Theology in South America--with echoes of the Shining Path and contemporary battles over oil, land, and welfare. Meanwhile, closer to home, there's a new threat in the air--one the police are entirely unprepared for....

Spanning four decades and two continents, Eleven Days finds Carrigan and Miller up against time as they face a new kind of criminal future. Stav Sherez is the author of two previous novels. The Devil's Playground (2004), his debut, was described by James Sallis as "altogether extraordinary, it introduces a major new talent," and was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasy Dagger Award. His second novel The Black Monastery (2009) was described as "dynamite fiction" in the Independent and "spectacular" by Laura Wilson in the Guardian.